All together now...

Last week I sent out a call on Twitter for people to send me interesting education questions for me to discuss, or issues to expose. Over the next few blog posts I'm planning to respond to some of the conundrums that were sent back to me. The first question I'm going to comment on came via Craig Taylor who asked how we should address 'the disconnect between how learners are learning to learn during their formal education years and the lack of tools/opportunities.'

This is an important question for all teachers to consider, but before they can address such a disconnect, they need to be aware that the problem exists, and then acknowledge it. There is a divide for example, between the technology children have at home and what they are provided with in school. Often, for poorer families, there is no computer at home, or if there is, it is an old computer, possibly with no internet connection. Even for children who do have internet connected computers at home, there may be limited, or no access because their parents or older siblings may get first use. Children who can't access computers at home are often at a disadvantage because they can't complete all of their homework, or they have no connection to send their assignments in to their teachers via e-mail. At the other end of the spectrum are those children from more affluent families who have technology at home that is far superior to the technology provided in the school. This may not seem to be as much a problem as the first scenario, but it nevertheless causes problems for some children. Whenever I visiting school (in the UK or in other industrialised nations) I notice that the children greatly outnumber the available computers. It's common to see several children grouped around each computer, all struggling to see the screen and competing for the keyboard and mouse.

Another problem related to the above, and one that is rarely considered, is the issue of transition from Primary to Secondary education. If a child transfers from a technology rich primary school into a technology poor secondary school, where resources are limited and need to be shared with many more children, other kinds of digital divide are experienced. What are the answers to these disconnects? Are there any? Well, as always, we can learn from initiatives in other countries.

There have been attempts to address the problem of ICT provision in poor regions of the world. Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child Project for example, was meant to be an answer to the digital divide. OLPC was an admirable project, but arguably and ultimately, it was has been less successful than was predicted. The low cost laptop was designed from the top down, with little or no consultation with those who would be the end users. Those who would be the main stakeholders were not consulted. It was essentially one man's crusade against poverty. Units were shipped out in their thousands, and although some were used, a large number of laptops gathered dust because no-one knew quite what to do with them. Ultimately, with declining government support and loss of sponsorship, the OLPC project downsized and laid off staff. It could be argued that OLPC was too far ahead of its time, but more realistically, the failure of the project was probably down to a lack of consulting and a failure to plan ahead.

At the 2010 IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane, I heard former Vice Chancellor of the British Open University Sir John Daniel compare OLPC with another project aimed at children in poverty - Sugata Mitra's highly successful Hole in the Wall initiative. Sir John said that the OLPC project resulted to a great extent on solo learning and discovery whilst Sugata Mitra's project involved young people learning together in small groups. The social aspect alone, he suggested, led to more success in learning outcomes and a richer experience. Either project could result in learning with no teachers present. The motivation to learn however, came not from having access to a computer, but from the curiosity of discovery within a social context, leading to opportunities to explore and gain knowledge together.

Whilst neither of the above examples actually offers a solution to the digital divides we witness between school and home, they do illustrate a very important point. Children learn more successfully when they are in small groups, and they learn more when they are interested and motivated. Perhaps the lack of computers in schools is having positive outcomes. Although it's not an ideal situation, there may be a silver lining to the cloud - with 2 or 3 children grouped around each computer may come the possibilities of richer social interaction and better connected thinking.

Image source by San Jose

All together now... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.